How To Do Email Marketing

How To Do Email Marketing

Email marketing has proven to be a successful strategy for many businesses. Although you may feel like email marketing is a dying trend because of social media, this is not necessarily the case. Globally, there are over 3.7 billion email users. Not using an email marketing strategy could mean missing a chance to connect with many valuable customers. Email marketing is an ideal way to nurture leads and gain more customers.

How do I start an email marketing campaign?

To begin using email marketing for your business, there a few steps you need to follow to ensure you develop a successful campaign. The following items are some of the most important steps you should take when creating a campaign.

Set goals & develop a strategy

Every type of marketing activity your business performs needs to begin with goal setting. You should decide what you want to get out of your email marketing campaign. Your goals could be to increase traffic, sales or leads or they could be more specific like to have a 15% open rate or a 20% conversion rate. No matter what your goals are, establishing them at the beginning will help you create a solid strategy.

With goals in mind, you can begin to set up a strategy. You should decide how often and when you will send emails. When planning, you need to decide which email marketing platform you will use. The following are some popular email marketing services you can choose:

Mail Chimp

Drip

Constant Contact

Email Brain

Campaign Monitor

Get Response

With your goals in mind and a strategy in place, you are ready to start building your email list.

Build an email list

You cannot have an effective email campaign without a list of email addresses. There are a variety of different ways you can build your email list. First, you can compile a list of known email addresses or past customers. Starting with your past customers is a great way to continue to nurture them and give them more opportunities to learn about your business and make another purchase.

If you don’t have information about your past customers, you can start from scratch to build an email list. Having an email subscription form on your website is a great way to start to build your list. This email subscription form could appear in your header, sidebar or popups.

Somewhere near your form, you should include an incentive for users to join your email list. For example, you can include an incentive to receive coupons, newsletters or tutorials relating to your industry. If users see the benefit, they will be more likely to enter their information and sign up for your emails.

Create your email template

With a quality email list, you are ready to start sending emails. You should create an email template that you will use for all of your email campaigns. By creating an email template initially, you will save time in the future and stay consistent throughout your campaigns. Using a similar design template will help users to recognize your emails each time you send them.

You want to continue to build your brand identity through your email campaigns. As you build your template, create a design that is similar to the colors and look of your website.

Track results

After you start sending emails, make sure you have a way to track your results. You email marketing service most likely has analytics features that you can look into. Google Analytics is also a valuable tool for you to analyze your email campaigns.

The following key metrics are ones you should monitor to evaluate the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Number of Opens — It is important to track how many of your subscribed users are opening your emails.

Bounces — Bounces refer to the number of email addresses your emails couldn’t be delivered to.

Open Rate — This is the percentage of users who opened your emails. Analyzing the open rate for each email campaign can help you see if certain titles resonated better with users and led to more opens. You can also see if sending at a different time of day led to more people opening emails.

Click Through Rate — This number refers to the percentage of users who clicked on a link within your email. You want to monitor the number of people who visit your website after receiving your emails.

Conversions — When a user comes to your website from an email and completes your desired action like making a purchase or filling out a contact form, that is considered a conversion. Conversions mean you either received a new customer or got a lead for a potential customer. Conversions are valuable and help you see the impact your email campaigns have on your number of customers.

Monitoring these key metrics will help you get a better understanding of your email subscribers. You can compare key performance indicators between campaigns to determine which were the most successful. Analytics can help drive your future campaigns and help you achieve better results for your next email campaign.

Segment users

Once your campaign is up and running, one way you can improve the results is by segmenting your email list. Segmenting your users based on demographics, geographic areas, or behaviors can allow you to send more personalized emails to each segment.

As you segment your users, you may be able to segment based on where these individuals are in your sales cycle. This form of segmenting will be a valuable way to customize your message differently for people who are just learning about your business and those who are ready to make a purchase.

Types of email marketing

Many different email marketing campaigns are available for businesses to try. The following are a few of the most common types of effective marketing emails.

Welcome — Welcome emails are a great way to introduce email subscribers to your business.

Cart abandonment — Sending emails with an incentive to users who abandon their cart could encourage them to return and make a purchase.

Promotions — Providing promotions and coupons will encourage subscribers to make a purchase.

Tips or tutorials — Providing tips and tutorials will show your subscribers that you are an industry expert and will help establish trust.

The above list doesn’t even begin to touch on the vast amount of email marketing campaigns you can have. Now that you understand what it takes to start an email marketing campaign, you can try different types to discover which email marketing campaigns work best for your business.